Content / Brand Protection And Web 2.0 Sites - How To?

With the recent onslaught of web 2.0 tube sites, social networking, and other types of user driven sites becoming more and more popular, as content owners, producers and customers, i wondered what methods we could all start to incorporate in order to protect our brand names and content itself from abuse on these newer content sharing / tube type sites?

Have any of you folks actually done anything to help curb the loss of business you may start seeing as more and more of these social/interactive content sites start popping up?

The most obvious thing i can think of immediately would be watermarking content but even that, in and of itself, presents problems with some business models, especially when it comes to paysite members areas and surfers not liking watermarks being all over their content.

So do you folks think there are some methods we could all start employing to ensure that the brand and value of our content isnt watered down as it makes its way on to tube and social networking sites?

Regards,

Lee

Flex and Flash might be the way to go for delivering content that can't be stolen from your site. Essentially all content would be accessed from a content viewer built in Flex/Flash. The content viewer would interact with scripts on the back end that serve media files to authenticated requests on the front end. And you wouldn't have to worry about flash extraction tools because they would only be able to steal your content viewer and not your content. This solution isn't 100% hack proof, but what solution is? I would guess it could deter most all content theft.

I see two potential drawbacks to this solution. 1) You require all clients to have Flash installed. With a 98% penetration rate, I wouldn't worry about those 2% who haven't moved into the 21st century. 2) There is quite an overhead proxying all media requests through dynamic scripts like php or ruby that are typically handled by the web server. However, this problem can easily be solved with server optimization and tuning, load balancing, opcode caching, horizontal scaling, etc.

I think delivering content this way would also be better for the overall end user experience with the use of rich graphics, transition effects and behaviors, etc. I'm sure somebody's doing this already???

use a watermark and a digimark. delivering content in a non downloadable format or method will protect your content, but it will also cost you some members. i suppose it's worth testing to see if it's just a few members, in which case it may be worth doing.

btw, we have ex members return because they say they saved our videos and a few months after they cancel they see our watermark and that reminds them to rejoin. you might lose some of those rejoins without the watermark.